Say So Long to an Old Companion: Cassette Tapes
By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN
There was a funeral the other day in the Midtown offices of Hachette, the book publisher, to mourn the passing of what it called a “dear friend.” Nobody had actually died, except for a piece of technology, the cassette tape.
While the cassette was dumped long ago by the music industry, it has lived on among publishers of audio books. Many people prefer cassettes because they make it easy to pick up in the same place where the listener left off, or to rewind in case a certain sentence is missed. For Hachette, however, demand had slowed so much that it released its last book on cassette in June, with “Sail,” a novel by James Patterson and Howard Roughan.
The funeral at Hachette — an office party in the audio-book department — mirrored the broader demise of cassettes, which gave vinyl a run for its money before being eclipsed by the compact disc. (The CD, too, is in rapid decline, thanks to Internet music stores, but that is a different story.)
Cassettes have limped along for some time, partly because of their usefulness in recording conversations or making a tape of favorite songs, say, for a girlfriend. But sales of portable tape players, which peaked at 18 million in 1994, sank to 480,000 in 2007, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. The group predicts that sales will taper to 86,000 in 2012.
“I bet you would be hard pressed to find a household in the U.S. that doesn’t have at least a couple cassette tapes hanging around,” said Shawn DuBravac, an economist with the Consumer Electronics Association. Even if publishers of music and audio books stopped using cassettes entirely, people would still shop for tape players because of “the huge libraries of legacy content consumers have kept,” he said.
As long as people keep mix tapes from a high-school sweetheart up in the attic, Mr. DuBravac said, there will still be the urge to hear them. “People have a tremendous amount of installed content and an innate curiosity when coming across a box of tapes to say, ‘Hey, what’s on these?’ ” he said.
The tapes started to really take off in 1979, the year that a radical new cassette player — the Sony Walkman — was introduced, enabling people to listen to Donna Summer and the Knack’s “My Sharona” while they were jogging (remember jogging?). The heft of the early Walkman — slightly smaller and lighter than a brick — is comical by today’s wispy iPod standards, but during the Carter administration it seemed sleek.
Nowadays, listening to music on cassettes is a dying pastime. None of Billboard’s Top 10 albums last week were issued on cassette, though half were released on vinyl, which has been resurging. Last year, only 400,000 music tapes were sold, representing one-tenth of 1 percent of all physical and digital music sales, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. In 1997, the figure was 173 million, and that was when cassettes were already getting a drubbing by CDs. (The iPod wasn’t introduced until 2001.)
“I would not expect to see a revival of cassettes like we’ve seen in the LP market,” Mr. DuBravac said. While vinyl records have always been prized artifacts for their devotees, the plastic cassette tape has little sex appeal.
Such was the case for the eight-track format as well, which was popular in the late 1960s and ’70s. It died relatively quickly with the advent of cassettes because eight-tracks were not widely used for personal recording or mix tapes, Mr. DuBravac said.
While the chances of finding cassette players in a dorm room today are slim, they are still available for sale: on Amazon, Sony alone offers 23 tape players, from the Walkman to boomboxes.
Popping a cassette in the car tape deck is also passé. Only 4 percent of vehicles sold in the United States during the 2007 model year had factory-installed cassette players, according to Ward’s Automotive Yearbook. As recently as the 2005 model year, 23 percent of vehicles had them.
Given that the median age of a car in the United States is nine years old, said Alan K. Binder, the editor of Ward’s yearbook, it is most likely that the majority of the 200 million cars and light trucks on America’s roads have cassette players (though how many have had the same Bob Seger tape lodged unplayable in them for 11 years is impossible to determine).
Cassette tapes’ tendency to hiss — and to melt in the summer and snap in the winter — turns off audiophiles. But for audio books, the cassette is an oddly elegant medium: you can eject it from your car, carry it home and stick it in a boombox, and it will pick up in the same place, an analog feat beyond the ability of the CD.
Cassettes accounted for 7 percent of all sales in the $923 million audio-book industry in 2006, the latest year for which data is available, according to the Audio Publishers Association. While many publishers, like Random House and Macmillan, stopped producing books on cassette in the last couple of years, there are holdouts.
At Blackstone Audio, which produces cassette versions of its roughly 340 annual titles, Josh Stanton, the executive vice president, said there was still demand from libraries and truckers, who buy them at truck stops. But he could forecast only that his company would produce cassettes through 2009.
Recorded Books, whose authors include Philip Roth and Jodi Picoult, still issues cassettes of all its titles, roughly 700 a year. Retailers like Borders and Barnes & Noble have essentially stopped ordering them, but libraries have been slower to abandon them, said Brian Downing, the company’s publisher.
The Web sites of Barnes & Noble and Borders, however, indicate that they still offer some cassettes, though publishers say the stores’ buyers have expressed little interest in ordering more in the future.
At some point, the cassette will go the way of the eight-track, Mr. Downing acknowledged, and his company will publish only in other formats.
“I would guess it would be pretty much gone in three years,” he said.
[NYTimes]
Sunday, July 27, 2008
R.I.P. Cassette Tapes
Monday, July 21, 2008
Cassette Tote Bag
CASSETTE™
mix it up with this retro carry-all
Time to unwind and rewind with this low-tech cassette tote bag.
Full-color printed flexible plastic, complete with handles that
look like the tape is unraveling (didn’t you just hate it when
that happened?). Casual and roomy, our Cassette tote is the
perfect way to pack your important stuff (like your leg warmers,
mini skirt, and jelly shoes). What a feelin’!
[WorldWideFred]
Music Retailer Thrives Serving Captive Audience
NEW YORK (Billboard) - As music retailers struggle to stay in business, a Los Angeles firm is doing nicely targeting a demographic that gets bigger every year -- prisoners.
More than 2.3 million people were locked up in federal, state or local systems at midyear 2007, according to the U.S. Dept. of Justice, and they want their Michael Jackson and Pink Floyd just like everyone else.
Enter North Hollywood-based Pack Central, which runs a mail-order operation for about 50,000 prisoners. It stocks about 10,000 CDs and 5,000 cassette titles.
Cassettes account for about 60% of unit sales, since CDs are contraband in many prisons because the hard plastics can be used for nefarious means. The screws that hold many cassettes together are also verboten, so owner Bob Paris must manually remove them. A bigger problem is that the labels have largely abandoned cassettes.
Paris says he started stockpiling cassettes five years ago. "People thought I was nuts when I invested tons of money in analog prerecorded music on tape," he says.
He plans to order small runs of his best-selling catalog titles from cassette manufacturers, although some new titles would also sell well in the format, Paris adds.
Best-selling current titles include Lil Wayne's "Tha Carter III," Mariah Carey's "E=MC2," Usher's "Here I Stand," Rihanna's "Good Girl Gone Bad," Nickelback's "All the Right Reasons," Leona Lewis' "Spirit" and Lyfe Jennings' "Life Change."
Perennial sellers include Al Green's "Greatest Hits," Linkin Park's "Hybrid Theory," Michael Jackson's "Thriller," Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side of the Moon" and a best-of collection by the Stylistics.
Pack Central sends out its catalog twice a year, with monthly mailers featuring new titles. Prisoners pay for product through money orders or checks drawn on a spendable trust account set up by their family members.
But Pack Central has to be careful even here. "If someone, due to a math error, shorted us $1, we used to fulfill the order and ask them send us a buck extra the next time," Paris says. "But that is extending prisoners' credit, which felons are not allowed to have, since they don't have the capacity to enter into a contract. So we got into trouble for that and now have to lop off an item and refund them the difference."
Given the harsh business climate for music retailers, Paris is thrilled that his business has been flat for the last five years, with sales hitting more than $1 million annually.
"I have dodged every conventional bullet that has hit most music retailers," Paris says. "I don't have to worry about downloading, legal or illegally. The beauty of it is that prisoners don't have Internet access and never will."
[Reuters/Billboard]
Dunno how long a dude locked up in the Pen is gonna last, rockin out to Mariah.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Friday, December 21, 2007
Cassette Tapes are Dead and Brian Dettmer proves it
Standing face-to-face with a full-size skeleton made from melted cassette tapes, the mind goes completely blank, spare the lone expletive: fucking-a. Seeing the long-forgotten work of R&B tenor Montell Jordan, and Steve Martin’s final comedy album, The Steve Martin Brothers—to name just a couple—eviscerated, twisted into bone shapes and pieced together into a perfectly articulate model is a singular experience. It’s just one of the works by Brian Dettmer at the International Museum of Surgical Science.
“Technology grows and mutates much like life or nature,” says Dettmer, the Atlanta-based artist (and former Chicagoan), about the connections between plastic and human bones. “Old forms die as new forms are born. In one way, cassette tapes and other media have become outdated technology and the remaining materials have become remnants or shells that used to contain a living material. There is also a stylistic and fetishistic connection between rock music and images…of death, skeletons and skulls.”
The rock & roll factor might be what makes it so difficult to engage the deeper symbolic forces at work here, and a separate skull made of heavy-metal tapes sitting on a nearby pedestal doesn’t alleviate the situation, especially not with a mouth and teeth forged from Mötley Crüe’s Shout at the Devil.
Brian Dettmer (born 1974) is an American contemporary artist. He is noted for his alteration of preexisting media -- such as old books, maps, record albums, and cassette tapes -- to create transformed works of visual fine art.
Check out some more of his works HERE
Source [Timeout]
